47: Paul Scherer - A Friend That Brings Us Closer

creating like a person that is uniquely incentivized straight belonging and connection in the world we know more people than ever before but at the same time we are like much less meaningfully connected the share of american like zero close friends went from like three percent to fifteen percent like half of american adults report being lonely feeling lonely is the equivalent to like smoking 15 cigarettes a day half of america smoking 15 cigarettes a day a world that is like completely isolated is like a world in which humans go extinct they've said explicitly you're building a mutual friend what are you trying to do it goes back to like a lot of the like simplicity of just go to our website and it's like, what do you mean you don't know what we're doing? It's like, I've just told you. It's like, we're building a mutual friend. And then you're like, yeah, but what do you actually do is like a mutual friend. And then I like usually like add some version of what we just talked about. And then they were just like, oh, you're building a mutual friend. And I was like, yes, I've been telling you. I think a lot of what we're thinking about and what we're creating starts actually counterintuitively not with the friend part, but the mutual part. Do you think you're authentic? My suspicion is that everyone is kind of the same in that we all have this like inner voice. And I think adulting in a lot of ways, is like learning to not listen to that voice. I feel like I always just listen to that voice. And everything I've ever done, every major decision was always just like, I was like, okay, I know that it's like, this is just my voice. And I just like, I have to do it. And I like followed my heart or whatever you want to call it. And maybe that's authenticity or maybe that's something else. Welcome to Dialectic episode 47 with Paul Scherer. Paul is the founder of Eigen, a new company building a mutual friend for the world. That might sound bizarre. It kind of is. but I was thrilled to sit down with Paul after being introduced to him by a few people I really respect to talk about his crazy vision for a way that AI might actually make us less antisocial and instead bring us together by being somebody that we all know and who creates social serendipity in our lives. Eigen's pretty early on, the product's in private beta, and so we weren't able to talk about it.

everything but we were able to dive a lot into the substance of what it is the philosophy behind why paul and his team are working on it in the ways that this introduces just a crazy new range of design problems for teaching parenting growing a sort of person that we might all know and that could actually make us closer to each other paul is very early on he is young i'm sure there are things he doesn't know But I have to respect his conviction, his point of view, and the way he is authentically trying to bring something to the world that he thinks it needs. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Paul. Before we get into the episode, I'd like to thank Notion, Dialectic's presenting partner. Notion's co-founder, Akshay Kothari, is actually the one who introduced me to Paul. And so I'm thrilled to bring these two worlds together. Notion is a collaborative workspace for your life's work. And over the last year has totally evolved itself into becoming a platform and a hub for the agents that help you and your team do great work. Notion also made a bunch of new announcements on its developer platform recently. I'll link to that in the description. And the way that they're pushing what you can do with agents is really remarkable. And certainly if you haven't used Notion a while, probably goes far and beyond what you can imagine for what's possible with Notion and with agents. You can learn more at notion.com slash dialectic. I highly recommend you checking out what is now possible as Notion has built AI in from the ground up. With that, here is my conversation with Paul Scherer. Paul Scherer, thank you for having me here. We're in the eigenoffice. specific type of space we have, you've curated for yourself. Yeah, it's really nice. We're very happy here. It's like, it's always like, I don't know, I think it's really important. I think a lot of people underestimate the power of space. We spend a lot of time here and, you know, I think we spend much more time here than at home. So it's like, it's got to feel really great. Well, I want to start by talking about this book that I had to hunt down, Momo.

a book that's referenced in your video, and either it was a good story or seemingly it was very influential to you when you were young. It's a children's book. And in reading some of it, it seems to me that there were a few ideas that really stood out. The first is time, in playing this idea of past, present, and future. Second is presence, obviously an extension of that. The third is listening, which obviously relates to presence. And then the fourth is friendship. And so there's this smattering ideas that I think inform a lot of the other stuff we're going to talk about today. Yeah. Um, but I'm curious why, what about this book stuck with you? Um, I don't know when you first read it. I assume you were quite young. Yeah. My dad read it to me. Uh, I was like, I was like eight or 10 or something like that. Um, and it's like, you read it again and then like school and it's like, it's kind of like a thing in Germany. And I think one of the things that really. I think is very true is just like, they have this like concept of time thieves. And I think it's really interesting because the book is like from 1973. Yeah. And so it felt pretty modern though. Well, this is the crazy thing. It's like, it's like pre-internet, pre like social media, pre, you know, real like personal computers or anything. This is like, it's like at a time where I don't know, there was like a bunch of computers, but like most people didn't have a computer. Right. And so it just feels like, you know, every year since then it's like become more relevant because it just describes so accurately kind of like the world. we we live in it's just like everything is just about like efficiency and it's about like um you know there's no there wouldn't be time for momo in this world right like people don't care it's like you know how does this help me you know get um you know more more efficient or it's like more productive or whatever and and i think i think that's like really i think it's always like a sign of like great work if it's like becomes more and more and more relevant over time um and and and i

I know, I give it to a lot of people and a lot of people really resonate with it. You are a striver. I don't know if that's a perfect word, but it's probably a representative word, at least of this city, of this industry, of doing startups at all. You're someone who dropped out of college, or excuse me, high school when you were 17. Do you feel like you're running out of time? I used to feel like that more. I don't know. I haven't felt like that in a while. I think it's like, what i think you know for for the first time ever i feel like we're like doing the thing and it's like there's like no real alternative there's like you know i was doing all these other things and i'm still like restless but i feel like there's like like there's no there's like no way out like i couldn't like go and be like okay great like let's you know whatever do anything something else it's like this is the thing and it's like and so you sort of stop feeling like you like you're running out of time because it's like there's no you're you're actually playing your game and it's like and that's just the game and the game is like you have to play it and it's like it wouldn't be fun if you wouldn't have to play it and um but but before i was feeling like i was playing the game it was like yeah okay like i need to like i need to play i need to get to the thing exactly i like that yeah there is a way that it's not quite abundance but there's something about once you've kind of found the thing you're like You're, and I'm sure you're antsy in a whole bunch of ways around getting, progressing this thing. Yeah. But it's like, oh yeah, I'm like, I'm where I'm supposed to be. I call it like, you know, like I was talking about this with Akshay a while ago and I was like, it's like short-term paranoia, but like long-term, like everything is, everything is exactly the way it should be. It's like. What about listening? There's, it's kind of the anchor. Momo's this character, this little girl. I don't know if she's a little girl. She's a girl who lives in the village that they go to. And the reason they're initially skeptical, the reason they're so, they're able to be so present with her, all these things that she helps people deal with their beef, whatever, is she's just this amazing listener. And maybe there's an element of this. We'll talk more about it. Like you are someone who certainly has a,

observational lens on human beings and the way people behave and are going to behave. But I'm curious if there's any thread there that felt resonant. I think like what's so interesting is like, she's like the polar opposite of the time thieves, right? So, and the reason she it's, it's almost like less about the, like listening and more about the, you know, the presence, but she's like the manifestation of like presence. And she listens so well because she doesn't look at her phone. You know, she doesn't like, feels like, oh, I have this like meeting 15 minutes from now and I'm like looking at my watch and I'm like, I should probably need to go. And it's like, she's just there with you 100%. And I think that's like, that's the, that is like, that's like so. antithetical to the time thieves because it's like they're like the manifestation of like you know you have to go there's like everything needs to be like and so she's just like fully there and i think that's something that is very rare um because we all have you know so many things that are happening that are like you know you know trying to get our attention trying to pull us in and um and also so much like you know not all of this is like bad right it's like there's a lot of opportunity a lot of things that you could be doing at any given point in time and so to be somewhere really present without without thinking about you know the the best listeners or the the hard thing about listening is you have to actually have to listen instead of like thinking about what you're going to say next right um and that's a really hard thing to do because you have to be truly present without any almost like any skin in the game of like i need to like achieve this or that or so it's just like i need to like you know tell them you know like how great i am or like you know that's like when you don't really listen but you're just like okay how can i like can you give me something that i can then like say the thing that i want to say um and i think that's like really interesting because she's just i wonder if like nonchalant is like the right word but it's like she's like she's just there there's like no it's like there's a sense of yeah yeah and i think that's really remarkable

Maybe that last bit, which is friendship. We're going to talk a lot more about friendship. You grew up in a remote place. What does it mean to be a friend? I don't know if there's like one definition that like works for every person. I certainly don't have it. I think there's like a few different themes. I think like great friends help you rediscover yourself. but they're also expansive and like surprising and delightful ways and they add new things. And so there's really these two elements, right? There's like, they ground you in who you are, but they also like push you and there's like- Deeper and wider. Right, right. Maybe first of all, like I briefly just alluded to it, you grew up in a place, as I understand it, that is quite remote. or at the very least quite small, not that far from Frankfurt, but not in the center of things. Now you're in San Francisco, you are in the center of things. How has the internet changed your life, and particularly on the dimension of relationships and people? I think every single person, you know, bar Samuel and my parents, that is in my life, I wouldn't have met without the internet. I think I was like 19 or 20, probably, you know, I think it was like 20 years old when I met the first venture capitalist, you know, maybe I was 21 and it's like, um, I didn't know what that was, or there was like, no, you know, there's like the, this world did, did not like exist in my, in my like world. I didn't know about it. And so, um, and neither, you know, did like anyone in my, like, like there's no one. that I met that was like, oh, here. You weren't one step removed from it. Right. Uh, yes. And so, um, without the internet, I think I wouldn't like, I definitely, I definitely wouldn't be here. And then all of these relationships are so many of these relationships are, you know, first or second order effective, like, just like meeting people on honestly Twitter. It's like, I met, um, a while ago, I met one of the founders of Twitter. It was very, you know, um,

transformative like you know so it's like a bit like me to hear because it's like not even here it was just almost a spiritual experience of like this person so in such a profound way like changed and shaped my life in in like such a big way that i don't even know if i could recognize me as a person without that thing i've i've had a similar experience with that website in particular um what about twitter Well, maybe first of all, were you as a kid or growing up, especially before you started to tap into this, were you a social kid? Were you lonely? I wasn't a very, I was like, I was like Marmite always. Like people either really like, I had like, I always made friends with some teachers. And so like some teachers always really, really liked me. And then like some really hated me. And then I always had like trouble with like people my age. It was like kind of difficult usually. The older I got, the like easier it became like directionally. But it was, it was never kindergarten. It was like easier. It was like, I was never like fully, fully lonely, but there was like, I was also, I was never popular, but I was, I really deeply wanted to be popular. And, but I was not at all. And, and, you know, reflecting on me as I, I, it was, it was very obvious that I wasn't popular. I was like, I, I, There's a lot of like social strategies that I did not know about. And I was like, if I, I think there's like, there's a lot of reasons of why I wasn't popular. Um, it was, uh, it was, it was always like, um, like that. And then yeah, the older, the older I got them, the more easy became. And then you just say I left school and you know, it's like sort of, you start, I always was like hanging out with like older people. Um, and then it's just start working. And so like immediately everyone there was like 30 plus. And so that, that just became my, what about Twitter or what about the internet? allowed you to find whatever um because i think next thing i want to talk about maybe to to turn the corner on it is like in what ways the internet has failed us as this connective tissue but i'm i'm first interested in the ways that it's actually like why was twitter for you at that time why did it work and what did you find there that was good i mean i was on twitter a lot you know during you know the

height of the pandemic where everyone was on Twitter and it was like kind of the greatest place on earth because like all these cool people had nothing to do other than being on Twitter. That didn't call a boss, right? Yeah, exactly. And so that was really great. And I actually went on Twitter. It was actually the wildest thing. I was like, at the time, I started like a tech block. And I was like, I'm going to write about like, you know, like these tech gadgets or software things that I really liked. and i wrote like two articles and i was like oh well no one is reading this like how am i going to get this like to promote this and then i was like maybe i'm just going to tweet about it and so i like created a twitter account and i you know it was like um it was like it was like yeah i created my twitter account um it's 21 or something i don't remember and you started just like sharing this article and it's like kept going what did you write about these articles like really just like yubi keys and like one password there's like the most reviewing them yeah it was the most obnoxious thing in the world and that is not the most obnoxious thing in the world it's obscure but it's definitely not secure it's not obnoxious some people might think what you're doing now is obnoxious we'll get to that but yubi keys yeah to be honest yeah it's obscure it was an obscure obsession for like this like uh kid to like write about this like 17 year old kid somewhere to be like here's like why uvqs are really great anyway so so i wrote this and i tried to like promote the blog and within like five days i was like the blog like this is really cool and i actually started like meeting people there and it was like there was just like there's like i remember there was this guy from uh from from ghana actually who's like i think he now has like 20 or 30 000 followers on twitter or something and we like we like somehow like met and we had like i had like 200 followers and he had like 300 or something. And we just like DM'd and then it'd be like, it'd be like this whole thing. And I spent 12 hours a day on Twitter and I have like 20,000 tweets and replies from that three month period or something. And it was just like, I would like send.

you know, 600 replies a day to like tweets. I would like, and it was just like, all of a sudden I had like the first tweet, it had like over a thousand likes or something really like the biggest rush. And then like, all of a sudden there would be all these entrepreneurs that like would, I remember like there was the COO of like ClickUp or something like liking and commenting on like my marketing. I was like a 17 year old kid. I'd never like, I mean, I'd like, I had no experience whatsoever. And I was like, here's how you should market yourself. And it's like, and the COO of like ClickUp was like, that's really great, great advice, right? It was just like, that makes sense. There's a lot about Twitter. honestly. Yeah, that says a lot about Twitter, uh, you know, deeply researched, uh, you know, it's like, um, uh, and, um, and then, yeah, I think like, you know, people start DMing and I actually, I sold this, like, I had this like digital product that I sold, which was called the Twitter DM mastery. And for a while, it's like a course. Exactly. For, for a while it was, I was the self-proclaimed, uh, king of DMs. Uh, and I, but I, because I would, I think for the first. 5,000 followers. I DMed every single follower that I like manually would be like, Hey, like, I'd like things for it. Like, I appreciate the support, whatever. And that's how I met a lot of the people. Um, and, and then I wrote like a book about this, which actually just like, I actually still think it's probably like a lot of people should read this because it's just like, it's very like, I mean, book is a strong word. It was like 20 pages or something, but, um, a great PDF. Yes. On DMing. On DMing people. And it was the whole, it was like a whole scheme. Anyways, so that's, I did that. And then I think that's just how I met, like that's how I met Ariel. That's how I met Caleb, who then like all of these things later turned into, you know, working with different kinds of companies and all that. Many of us have had positive experiences, whether they be Twitter or elsewhere. And there's a romantic idea about the way the internet used to be or what it was meant to be. This is like, it should be the best.

connective tissue in the history of the world. And yet many people feel the opposite. You've talked about what happened when we conflated or combined social and media. What is social and what is media? In this context, at least. I think in this context, you know, media is like, you know, maybe could be defined as like popular content, which is like, right, if you scroll on Instagram, it's actually not about your friends, right? It's like, it's about It's about, you know, popular content or popular people, right? So it could be a reel that is going viral from like a random account, but you don't know that account and like neither do your friends. And it could be a celebrity, but it's, and social is much more about your social graph. Like who are the people that you know? And I think if you sort of, a lot of the, you know, interaction paradigms of these platforms are, you know, originally. you know used to be much more social which is like it's all about you know sharing a story with your friend or you know posting something and all your friends are going to see it but like actually now it's it's sort of become much more media which there are reasons for that um and you know it's just like it's all about incentives right they didn't do that for like instagram wasn't there being like that wouldn't be cool if we were really evil and we like make made it all about that they were just like, well, that just works, right? And it's like, it's really hard to get a lot of people to share content, for example, right? So like one of the issues is that, you know, your friends are probably much worse at creating engaging content than like someone who's really good at creating engaging content. Right, right, right. It's not a totally common experience, but I think across different parts of the internet, whether it be Twitter or Instagram or other modern things or forums in the past or IRC or whatever, I think one of the things that is wrong is the notion that you should only use the internet with people you already know in real life. Because to your earlier point, social doesn't necessarily mean people you already know. Yes, that's true. Can you talk a little bit about that distinction? In theory, in my view of the internet, it's almost actually that, or at least what I always felt was so amazing about Twitter is that it wasn't about who you knew. It wasn't just about what you were interested in.

getting to know people by way of what you were interested in yeah i think that's i think that's true and and really you know there there's like this like discovery aspect of like um and and i think for better and for worse right there's like i always say there's like there's on the internet there's like enthusiasts for everything right so so like if you live in this like place with a thousand people or even you know like a medium-sized city or whatever there might not be someone who's like absolutely obsessed with i don't know plants right there may be i mean it might be a more common obsession but but on the internet there there's like millions of people who are and so there's like there's definitely an aspect of like feeling like belongingness in in that because you're you have so much more reach um and find the other weirdos you can find the other weirdos you know that that creates a very long tail right of like Um, and that, that sort of then is like one of the reasons that, um, we as a group have much like, cause we just like, we, we're, we're able to like go into much more of these individualist pursuits. Um, because there's so much, so much, the, the, the, the tail is just so much longer, uh, then that would be like a city, right? Which makes. That's not intuitively antisocial to me. Like in theory, it should lead to the long tail of a million, like let a million communities bloom of weird niches. Totally. I think the. the these aren't like mutually exclusive but but the but the problem is like your the things that you consume shift towards a more at least locally isolating view right because your twitter feed is like filled with people that are obsessed with plants right but they might not at all be in your local like actual like like like in person like like proximity yeah and but so and so all the people you interact with in person on a day-to-day like have their own like isolated feet of these types of people uh and then you have like much less of like a sort of bridging experience where you could like go to your office and there'd be like this thing that just like everyone knows about right like the global village the um the um water cooler talking about reality tv or yeah exactly like it's like moon landing

moon landing or you know even just like even just like headlines or something or like memes the most like mainstream seeming you know meme or like headline or whatever is actually not that mainstream anymore right right where where you'd be like oh wow like snl adopted this thing everyone must know about this and you go to your office you're like oh wow did you see this thing and like people are like what what are you talking about right and that's like the problem right you can do it in san francisco a little bit with twitter because it's like you there is but Do you think personalization of everything is just fundamentally inevitable? Really, that's what this is about, right? What technology has gotten really, really good at regarding our attention is just tuning it to being exactly pole-shaped. And that is causing this context collapse that you're pointing at. Yes. I don't know if anything is inevitable like that. I think it's definitely, there's good reasons for it, and it's not. it's not like completely bad right there's like great things about you know stuff being personalized to you i think i ultimately do think that people are craving like social right it's like you don't want in in in some cases you do but in many cases you actually don't want the you know the take or recommendation or whatever that's like personalized just for you you also don't want the monocultural like average take of the world You want the take from the people that you care about. Right. Right. I want to talk a little bit about what you are making, but before we quite get there, you have this view that like much of what we were just discussing, there's all these tailwinds. We are more isolated. People are more alone. Derek Thompson's gone crazy on this. People aren't having kids, all this stuff. And it seems like your instinct is that This is, as many people believe, this is driven by technology. You have used some variation of the phrasing, the world needs this, in terms of what you're doing. And there are two maybe cuts on what interesting views or unique views you have. I think they are one being thinking about friendship in a slightly new way. And then the other is this idea that AI as it currently stands is pretty antisocial.

And I think those two things go together. Maybe one strange cut on this is that opens the door is like, we all talk about AI as like crypto or VR or whatever. The one person I've noticed who doesn't talk about it like that is Kevin Kelly. Kevin, former editor of Wired Magazine, a bunch of other things. Kevin talks about AIs, which is a subtle but important difference. And it does point at maybe this future of a world where there are, Many of us are talking to AIs of some kind. And it seems like your core view is that based on how everything is going, we are going to be talking to AIs alone in our rooms. First of all, what would you say to the people who are still skeptical of the notion of, you seem pretty convinced that we're all going to be talking to AIs or AI or whatever. proximity are already talking to AI all day. Like every single one of our engineers. Maybe they would say I'm using Claude. Yes, but like we are already communicating with it. And like Samuel sometimes swears at it and just like, what are you doing? Like, it's just like, you know, it's like why we can make- Samuel's one of your first employees. There's like a bit of a difference in the interaction paradigm from like, you know, software in terms of like- i always like i always ask people whether or not they say thank you to like do you are you like someone who says thank you i don't always say thank you i'd say thank you probably less than i used to but i try to every once in a while yeah just to make sure we're on the on the good books you know when they do a really when it does a really good job yeah it inevitably takes over an extra mile we can just like we'll be on the good do you say thank you i i sometimes do i try to yeah but but it's like that's like a ridiculous thing right or like like who's like do you ever like google something and you're like oh thank you so i think that's true and i think the other thing that's true is that fundamentally it's interesting to to think about this in the context for example for a lot of education software or products because um previously it was really really difficult to build for example products for like you know the the basic like uh uk through like eight basically like young young young children just as much as it was really hard to build for like elderly people and it's it's interesting because the because

when you build software um with like a you know graphical user interface and you just you have to like learn a new interaction paradigm you can make them like skew more fake and skew more in like some way right like make it like feel really comfortable and like you know make it like okay this looks like you know your your rolodex looked like and you know in reality and like so it's like a contact thing but at the end of the day there's like there's like a barrier of like that you have to kind of overcome of like okay this is like if i give like my grandma the she's kind of scared because it's like this thing and it's like, it doesn't feel real. And I think what's really interesting is that the AIs speak human language. And so the interaction paradigm is the exact same that we all have been learning ever since we were born. in interacting with other other people there's like you know you can build a trust in that it can understand your intent and it can like you know relate and um and i think that really changes a lot of things where it's like it's like will my grandpa ever fully adopt you know you know internet technologies i don't know but i actually think it's not unlikely that he'll like eventually adopt a lot of ai products because it might be embedded in his world in such a way where he doesn't actually have to reflect that much yeah on on whether or not it's not it's that or that it's more human shaped it's in a way that almost necessary like it's almost necessary that we anthropomorphize it maybe not necessary but it's uh inevitable almost inevitable that we anthropomorphize it we already kind of anthropomorphize it because we talk Right. Languages with, with, with chat GBT and, and, um, you know, and he has like a voice, you try to, but he has like, you know, the, like, there's like, all of these things are very niche and they're like, not, you know, it's not, there's a, there's a small minority that is currently feeling like that, but like the, like for GBT 4.0 thing of like how, how many people got like, like identity. I don't know that that's a small minority, but it's like, I think it's like largely a small minority compared like.

There's this like stats, which a lot of people are doing it, but yes. Yeah. There's a stat, which I'm, I'm sure you've seen of like, you know, all these like dots of like, you know, millions of people represent millions of people. And there's like all these gray dots. And then there's like a few green dots, which is like people that use the AI for free. And it's like 2% of the world or something like, I don't know. We are very, very early in this. And I think it's easy to forget that when you are like around people who are like, we are in this like industry and in this, in this, in this. you know very specific place where everyone is like somehow billions of dollars deep into really believing that this is like everything today and i i think it's probably not but it's gonna be so much more in like 10 years from now but stuff just takes time usually to like become you know meaningful i always just like have this thing where um people just right now on twitter you know, there's like, there's like, there's like a different take on Twitter, like trending, you know, every, every couple of weeks. And right now it's like, it seems to be like, like product is like dead, right? It's like been automated away. It's like, right. Anthropics got this, right. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, there's, you know, it's commoditized to build great products yet. I've actually like, tell me all the great products that have come out since strategy Bt dropped. I don't, I don't know that there's a single new product in my life other than the LLM itself. And then for enterprises like Cloud Code, but other than that, these two things, there's not a single product that has come out. that has changed you know my life or my mom's life right and and i i think that's like it's still just as hard to innovate on product it might be easier to build once you have a great idea or all of these things are somewhere true you can build a lot of stuff much faster but it's still just as hard to build a great product and that's why it takes time because like figuring out what it looks like to build a great product is like you know still really hard and um i i i don't know i think it's just

sort of these consumer builders you know that that are going to build the the you know five to ten products that are going to like maybe come out of this and that yeah real people are going to like use in you know for the product by the way not necessarily because it's an ai or not an ai or because it's like this or that model but because it's a great experience i think they're like they're just like being started right now people are talking to ai friends um whether it's the 40 thing my boyfriend is ai it's replica and again to the earlier point like most people probably see that as strange or bad or evil or whatever um your cut on it is that it's critically it's anti-social like most of these products actually incentivize you to spend more and more time talking along to the eye which is which is by the way it's like that's not like um like zach went on a podcast and he was like it was like a year ago or something and he he he literally said Humans have a capacity for five friends, five close friends, but the average American only has two. We're going to build the other three. He literally said that, right? That's what he wants to do. His best case is for you to spend your Friday night talking to this thing, right? That's what, that's what he likes or what, you know, you know, what his organization that he's running is like trying to create another world. You are. I think there is some question of what you are actually making. And I want to litigate that a little bit today, acknowledging that you're not ready to share totally everything. You have said explicitly you're building a mutual friend. Yeah. But you are building an AI friend in some dimension. But I want to talk about it. But what are you trying to do? I think we are trying for you to spend your Friday night with other people, right? And we're trying for you to... I want people to feel like they could belong. Okay. Let's go one click deeper. What are you making? We're building a mutual friend that is like where I think a lot of what we're thinking about and what we're creating starts actually counterintuitively not with the friend part, but the mutual part, right? Which is the network, which is, it's actually.

You know, we, you know, we have like, right now we're like four engineers and like three of them are working on the network piece. Yes. Right. Which is partially because it's very hard. The, the friend piece is like something that was very hard to split up and there's like, but it's also because it's really, really, really important that at the core of everything we do, the like. the the network it like sits the network it's like everything like we have this like product principles like shared from day zero it's like every time we built something we build it in a way where it's where it's sort of built globally where it like it is built on top of the network where it's shared between all of the people that you know or that like are sort of users and and i think that's like you know a really big difference and then obviously there is like the you know the friend piece of of the mutual friend which is you know i just think that you know in in lots of ways the most intuitive and natural way of interacting with this like incredibly powerful network that we're building is like an extra person and like someone who we just all know in common because that there's again you know, as we previously said, there's a lot of like interaction paradigms and norms already established of like how that would look like. And like, you know, if I share something with you and you tell to someone else, it's like these, like there's like norms that are established that, um, are, you know, either, you know, codified or even just implicitly clear to most human beings. And it goes back to the point you're making about your dad, you know, how to interact with a person. exactly exactly as a ui metaphor exactly no you do like it's like you don't really have to learn it and i think it's actually kind of interesting because a lot of people are still you know we we went out we you know we did this like announcement and we're like we're building a mutual friend and then everyone's like well what are you doing and i was like we're building a mutual friend people i think still have like a hard time accepting maybe the which is totally fair because they haven't seen it and i think it's like in a lot of ways it's like um

it's like a waymo product where everyone i've ever told about waymo that isn't maybe from san francisco like if i tell my mom about waymo she's really scared he's like this is the most crazy thing ever like you know and then you're just like you're like force her to take away more and it's like i don't want to do this like 10 seconds to the ride it's like it's the most normal thing in the world right it's like of course it's like a spiritual experience of some level if you like understand it's like that's kind of a crazy you know feat of achievement we have like self-driving cars and it's like no one by the way it's like i find it's crazy that people don't talk about it because like i grew up in like this world where self-driving cars were like this like crazy thing that maybe one day that wouldn't be like insane and so hard and and now we just have self-driving cars and by the way five minutes 30 seconds is your first waymo ride you're like looking at your phone you forget that yeah exactly it's it's but that's the thing right it's like it's so it's just makes sense and i think in a lot of ways It's like, maybe that's the struggle that people have is they haven't interacted with it yet. And I think there's like something that like kind of like clicks for a lot of people once they first interact with it of like, oh no, you're actually, it is just a mutual friend. It's just, it's just like everything is just like, because people like, I think if you go to our website and you open like this letter that we wrote and you just take it very literal, I think it's just like, you're just like. You are being quite literal. Yeah. It's funny. Samuel on your team here, I spoke to him and he was, he said, in some sense, this is actually a fairly small step or at least a medium step technology wise, but it's a very big step idea wise. And I think that maybe is getting it part of this. I think it's also worth establishing one of the things you said to me early on is like, what would happen if a person could be friends with a million people? Yeah. Which obviously isn't possible for a human being. I also think one of the things that was interesting to me is that

Most of the AI products we have built are trying to do human work better or faster or cheaper. You are explicitly building something that a human being couldn't do. Yeah. And it's one person. Yeah. I have talked to this person. This person will have a name. Why is it critical that it is one person? With the personality. It just comes back to, again, the mutual part is more important than the friend part. It basically comes down to the question or the debate, or it's an interesting thought of how much more or less flexible is personality as an interface than graphical user interfaces. I think it's going to take people a second to grok that. I mean, really, how much more... Inside of what you're saying is how much more flexible is interacting with a person than a graphical user? Exactly, right? Where you have... Consumer networks are very unbundled right now, right? Like, there's, like, all these different consumer network products. Pretty much all of mainstream consumer products. You're talking about Twitter, Instagram. Yes, but even, like, Yelp. like Google Maps. These are all consumer networks. Basically, every single mainstream consumer piece of software that is on your phone right now is networked, is based on top of the network, except for ChatGPT. It's the only non-networked mainstream scale product. But if you look into the networks of all these different apps, there's a lot of overlap between all of the Yelp users and all of the Twitter users and all these users. But there's a lot of specificity in the user interface of the app that makes it very obvious that Yelp couldn't also be Twitter. I see. And I don't know, or it's at least not obvious to me, that the same thing is true for personality. I think there's a few...

cuts that you're that you're gonna have to make which is like i think you don't want your mutual friend to be your assistant it's like very very importantly and that's like one big separation and also i think it's worth establishing in some sense chat gbt if you were to personify it or claude is a mutual friend in that we are all quote unquote friends with claude but claude doesn't know we're friends Exactly. That's the part I think maybe that might not be obvious to people. Actually, I would push back because I don't think Claude is a friend. Claude is a servant. It's like an assistant. Claude's someone we all know. But you lose a lot of the, he's a mutual assistant, right? And I think you lose a lot of the important parts of like a friend. the second it becomes an assistant. Interesting. That's where there is a big differentiation. And I think a lot of things that people are building are in the assistant career. Like a therapist would be an assistant, right? It's like you wouldn't want- Service provider. Exactly. You wouldn't want your friend to be your therapist. Why do I want an AI friend? I think you want, I don't know that you need an AI friend. I think you need an AI mutual friend, which is like, you want the network, right? The network is very powerful, which is like, what are all of the people that you care about? thinking about, talking about, doing, you know, or have done in the past or, you know, like it's, it's, again, it's like much less about the friend and much more about the mutual. You are building a social network in a sense that is inside of this person we all know. Is that fair? I, I don't like the word social network because I think it's like, there's too much loaded there. I think we're like, we're building like a network of people. and they just all know this person we're building a person we're building a person like an extra person that has a really you know that knows a lot of people and has a really great you know social cognition ability of like reasoning over you know the world's social graph one of the things i said to you early on when i was trying to understand this was it's like a little bit like the 100 person village and there's an innkeeper who knows everyone

i'd love to talk a little bit about like what goes into making this person who knows everyone good for the world the first would be you've you've told me one of your core governing constraints is whether or not a real person would do this again if a real person wouldn't do this we're not going to do this yeah say more about that i think it's like it's like an interesting it goes back to like a lot of the like simplicity of we just go to our website and like what like it's like what do you mean you don't know what we're doing it's like i've just told you it's like we're building a mutual friend and and then you're like yeah but what you actually was like a mutual friend and then i like usually like add some of you know some version of what we just talked about and then i end up being like oh you and then they're just like oh you just you're building a mutual friend and i was like yes i've been telling you and um and i think part of um that constraint is exactly like that which is the best products or whatever you want to call it, are sort of a product of constraint and of limiting yourself in certain ways. And I think in both that constraining way, but also at the same time, you can sort of lean on to this idea that, well, if you don't quite know what the answer to any product problem that you might have in your head is, you're just like... be like what you just think about what would what would i do right if i was like um if someone was like really mean to me like what how would i react like and it's just like you sort of like think about that and and it and it's really helpful because you just it's really that simple i think because that's the that that paradigm has already been established and so it's very intuitive for people they don't have to learn anything new they just have to like realize that you know it's the same A lot of your design or a lot of your product philosophy is very intuitive. Um, maybe in part due to things like this, maybe one thing we're distinguishing would be you are building a person, but you're not trying to build another human. Exactly. What is the difference? It's a, it's a big question. What's a, what's, what's, what's personhood and being a human. I think there's like.

What something we've learned over time is, is that, you know, honesty is really important in building, you know, a person like that, where there's distinct things that are actually true, which is, for example, um, you know, this person has thoughts. Like I can show you the thoughts. I can show you the thinking traces. you know maybe much less sophisticated than human thoughts but there's thoughts right he's like thinking these things through at some level this person's like opinions and some resemblance of emotions and all of these things that are like real um he can like read things on the internet consume content you know come up like all these things are are real right they're actually happening there's it's not a lie but um he doesn't have a body right so he can't go Or, um, he wasn't like born from, you know, parents that are just like that, like that, like, because that would just be a lie. Right. So I could like, I could like, you could, you could like program it and you could be like, you're a parent, you know, Bob is your backstory. And, and, and, you know, and then here's how you feel about it. And, and, but, but they wouldn't be true. They would be made up. Right. So if you're talking to him and he was like telling you about it, it would be a lie. Um, but if he talks to you about his. you know, thoughts and feelings and opinions about anything, right? Be it another person that you know, or something that's happening in the world. It's actually, it's not a lie. It's like, it's actually what he's thinking about it. And so I think honesty is really important because if you're really radical about that, I think you actually, you can gain a lot of trust because it doesn't become this like, you know, entertainment product or this character i like thing where you're like sort of trying to you know imagine that this would be real and but it but it but but it can be you know actually can be the same level of fidelity because he just knows so many people one of the things that i think is like really important and like building a relationship with any person or um uh you know whatever you you know end up wanting to call it i think um probably maybe the word hasn't been invented you would we're not using the name

It has a name. It will have a name. You will refer to it by its name. Yes. Maybe also, I think, just to keep... I want to make sure... There's a bunch of interesting philosophical stuff, but I want to ground it enough without people being able to see it. What is interacting with this like? What do you talk to it about? What is a mutual friend? Why do we need a mutual friend? At the very high level, I think we are all... We know more people than ever before. So, like, 100 years ago, the average person would maybe know, like, 100 people, maybe 200, whatever. Right now, the average person knows around 600 people. Knowing mean, like, people that you could, like, place on the graph, right? Not people that you, like, are best friends with, but, like, you're just like, I know this person. You could have, like, context on them. But at the same time, we are, like, much less meaningfully connected. And it's like every like pointer is like, you know, I have this like list of like facts, which is like really stupid, but it's like every, every pointer, the share of American men have like zero close friends went from like 3% to 15%, right? 15% of Americans have zero close friends, American men, sorry. Like half of American adults report being lonely. Half of American adults, 50%, right? And by the way, like, you know, feeling lonely is the equivalent to like smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So it's like half of America smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The share of Americans who say most people can't be trusted has like halved since like 1970s. It's like we're around like 30% of Americans think that most people can't be trusted. Fertility rates are going down. People don't go to like church. And by the way, somebody listening to this is like, yes, why is this all happening? Technology. And your contention... There are many reasons this is happening, right? There are cultural reasons. It's technology. There's so many different factors. But at the end of the day, this is two pages about suicide rates, religion. It's hundreds of pieces of data that all point towards this same thing, which is isolation. We're not hanging out anymore. Even though we know more people than ever before, we feel much less meaningfully connected to each one of them.

you know in a world by the way that's like completely isolated is like a world in which humans go extinct there's like no humans right if we don't at all hang out because we're you know we we're not in relationships we're not having kids whatever but like it's also not really worth being a human in a world that's like completely isolated because we're just like there's no social connection we're very very deeply social animals this is not a warm fuzzy feeling kind of thing of oh wouldn't it be nice if we all felt like kind of like a bit more warm and like connected it's like it's real it's existential yeah and and i think um you know this isn't like we're building this like cute little pet thing it's existential and i think if people aren't taking this like these like hundreds of like studies and like count like like like measures more seriously we're going to have serious issues as a society. These fertility rates issues are so exponential that people underestimate this. Seoul in Korea, we talked about this yesterday, has 0.5 fertility rate. What this means in practice is that every generation is 33% smaller than the last one, which means Seoul is 10 generations away from being not there anymore. And everyone's, like most, maybe not in San Francisco, most people's response to that would be like, we need to ban Instagram and turn off the computers. And your argument is somehow that we're going to solve this with AI, which is pretty theoretical. But I think it's like just so different because again, it's so intuitive and it's like, it comes down to like the incentive structure. By the way, it's a really, really, really difficult problem to solve. And I think this whole thing of like, how do we ensure the, you know, long-term human flourishing as like a species and like prevent ourselves from going extinct is a very complicated problem it's like again you can go back to korea they spent like basically like uh they had they used to have like 1.3 fertility rate right and then there's like 20 years ago and over the last 20 years they spent like 200 billions of 200 billion dollars to like increase fertility rate and in that time it went to like 0.5

right it's very very hard to reverse the trend because it's like so ingrained it's like the reverse pyramid effect it's having all over the world basically right it's like once you normalize not having kids you're like so so all these things are are true it's very very difficult thing to change again i said this before but it's not like There's someone on Instagram. It's not like Adam Missouri is there. Make everyone lonely. Yeah, Mr. Burns being like, I'm going to make everyone really lonely. That guy is like a bunch of kids and a family, and he probably goes to sleep feeling great about himself because otherwise he probably wouldn't do this thing. And at the end of the day, they just have incentive structures. They're like a company. They're trying to make money. So at the end of the day, everything is downstream of that. And that's just the thing that works for them. And so if you want to create... a new generation of technology that... With different incentives. Well, with a different outcome, you have to design the incentive structure correctly. And I don't actually get to design the incentive structure correctly. It's like there's inherent incentive structures for certain types of products. And I think... And your argument is that this medium has a different incentive structure. I think if you truly are... not a servant, but a peer, you, you kind of, you're bound by the social norms, right? So the, one of the, one of the things that I would say is like, we are a platform, but we're also a participant, right? And so, um, the, the, the things that happen on the platform are really closely, um, tied in perception to the participant. And so if if this mutual friend that we're building is a massive asshole, guess what? You're just not going to talk to him. Or it betrays my trust. It gossips about me. You're just not, at some point, you're just like, stop going to talk to him, right? And so, of course, there's like a line, but again, it's about like, just as with any other person, if you tell me all your secrets and I go and tweet them, you're just going to not ever tell me anything ever again because you're going to learn. And I think that's really great. Whereas social platforms today,

get to enable bad behavior, but they don't, you don't blame Instagram or Twitter, you blame the bad people. Exactly. So you have to make a thing, as you were talking about earlier, that I trust and that I'm willing to be vulnerable with. How do you do that with an AI? With a mutual friend? I think it's like about, it's like, it's just like, you don't, you just don't talk as much about that, right? The AI part and like all of these things. It's not about, You know, there's like people being vulnerable with like all kinds of tech products, right? There's like day one, the like journaling app. And like people write all kinds of crazy things into that. It's like a text input box. I believe something about it though, which is that it's private and that it's not going to be shared with people and it's not a person. Well, but you believe something about it. It comes down less to the peripheral. or the modality of the product and much more about the beliefs you have of what happens with the thing yes and so if your beliefs are you know trusting and you you know that that's what it is you trust the thing right but like they it's not actually given that like you know if you if you if you had you know your journaling app and you wrote something in there's a bunch of information in there that you actually would have no issue for me to know You might even want it to be, right? You know, but it's just, like, it's all about, like, you know, if you could have someone that you really trust, that is, like, really emotionally intelligent, decide, and you really buy into and believe into this entity's or person's emotional intelligence to figure out which of the things that you say I should know, it's all about the belief and the trust and the thing, or the arbiter, or whatever you want to call it, and the broker. um it's a broker in some way it's a broker you know what's interesting is it's a little bit like there are these different mediums i i type i enter information onto a phone um one of them is twitter another of them is a journal app or notes app a third of them is a group chat yeah those are all different those have different levels of context and i'm making decisions about you're basically arguing or you're you're trying to design a thing that can help me better share context with the people i know

It's like an information broker of some sort, right? But it's like, it's... What would cause me to talk to it? You use this word when I talk to you, I talk to your team, you use this word salience a lot. Everybody on the team uses salience. Maybe that's a key to answering that question. But yeah, why do I want to talk to this? I think there's like a few different ways of answering this question. You know, and it's both about like... long-term but aliens is like a long-term thing or it will it's it's more like um thing that you source out of it right which is like learning something about other people or about other things or about the world or about yourself right that like you you can source sort of from the network which is like that is critically that is locally relevant to me right yes yes which is like which is like something that is uniquely enabled by the network um and then there's another thing But, which is like much more like, you know, transactionally, like, why will you talk to, right? Because it's like, it requires, that's like a thing of like, you source something, right? But it's like, why would you give something? And I think part of the answer is actually interesting. I go to ChatGPT because I'm like, I need help solving this problem. Do some work for me. Exactly. But part of what's really interesting is that, you know, for the first time ever, the, you know, creation process. might be the same as the consumption process. Because you asking a question teaches me something about you, which is like, hey, what restaurant should I go to? Oh, Jackson's going to a restaurant, right? It's like a platform where consuming is actually also creating. Because it's all about information and knowing what's relevant to people. So that's one answer. And then the other is, yeah, you can get access to these uniquely salient pieces of information that matter to you. And then I also would hope that you sort of, over time, build some sort of relationship and trust into this person's opinion and taste. Let's be even more specific.

I'm going to go to Chachapiti, like a restaurant example. Chachapiti is kind of like a personified Google in a little bit of a way. And I'll say, hey, I'm staying in the mission and I'm looking for a place like this. Why would I talk to my mutual friend? Because, you know, LMs in lots of ways, I always say are like the internet smoothie. Interesting. It's like, it just like, it takes like all of the internet takes. and like puts it in like a blender and like serves you like the average take it's like the world's average take yeah it's like a 4.2 on yelp exactly and but like you actually you want the salient take which is like what is like what are the places that your friends care about um or not even just your friends but like someone who has really great tastes in restaurants that you just like buy into you may have never met that person but it's like it's much more about like you know salient information versus just like average or median information of like um here's what's happening so it's like it's like you know like sometimes it's like you text him or just like interact with with him and you'd be like what restaurant should i go to and he like you like think about it and you're like you know remember conversations he had in the past with like other people um and he might text a bunch of knows who i know he might text a bunch of people that he knows oh wow that you might not even know being like, I have this friend, which, by the way, again, goes back to honesty, which is like, I actually think one of the things that is really important in building a relationship is that sometimes this other person reaches out to you with something that, like, it wants from you. And it's like, it's like, but it's like, hey, Jackson, I know you always have, like, such great, you know, taste in, like, in, like, Indian restaurants, right? I have this, like, friend, and he, like, needs this, like, I don't know, I've been, like, thinking about it, like, which place do you think you should go to, right? And that's actually not a lie. It's not a made up thing. It's not like a push notification that you get that is like this like LLM trying to like put you. It's actually true. He really does have a friend who's really looking for that very specific thing. And you're going to like, you're going to, you're going to like. It's so hard to think about because it effectively, this is like a million. Like what if you could, what if you could have a person who had a million friends? Exactly. It wouldn't be the same as a network with a million people because.

It would be the, because to go back to this example of the restaurant, if I asked you where I should eat in San Francisco, you could do some variation of this thing, but it would be just way subscale. Yeah. And you don't know everyone I know, but it's, so is it, is it omniscient? Is it bordering on the omniscient? And maybe more importantly, to get back to this other thing, you are, this thing has to be really, really, for lack of a better word, emotionally intelligent about what, about all those works. Yeah. I think it's, it's, it's, it's mostly about emotional intelligence because it's not, it's kind of like, I don't know if omniscient is like the right word because it's like omniscient is like, is too, like, we're not trying to have all your context. we're trying to have the same vantage point that another person in your life would have which isn't omniscient like if you know like your good friends don't know everything about you they don't see your thoughts they are not in every meeting with you right they know like they know what you share with them both directly or indirectly via other people or you know via whatever instagram twitter your podcast whatever and and that's that's that's not infinite right that's not omniscient it's like right there's like they're like you have a peer relationship with them and they get a certain piece of it and that's you know that's how they form a perception of who you are and that they do that with every single person and then um they can like reason over it and they can like be emotionally intelligent about how to connect the dots um but they're and and you know and they can do that with different people differently and they you know they there's a lot of nuance in this basically but it's not omniscient because it's not almost like there's like when i when i think about right there's like there's like the the servant which is like you're their boss there's the peer right which you're like sort of equal and you don't the peer doesn't control you and nor do you control the peer right it's like i can't tell you what to do i can like try and i can like you know but i i don't you know ultimately it's like up to your own reasoning of whether or not you want to opt into whatever i'm trying to do but maybe there's like this other thing which is like your master

And that's what I'm thinking about when it's like omniscient, where it controls you. And it probably has more local context on me and my relationships than any of my real or human friends would have. If this gets actually to the point where like a million people know it and talk to it. But that's true. But I think you underestimate maybe how much context you have. of people. I'm sure I do. It's a great point. Think about how much you know about all the people. Try and create a list of all the people you know in your life and the relationship. Well, a lot of it is tasking, which is that I wouldn't even necessarily be able to pull it out on cue, but if it were prompted in the right way, it would come out. But I'm sure even if you were to sit down and spend a couple of hours trying to do this, you'd get quite far and you'd be like, oh, I know a lot of stuff. Because it's like most of your brain's activity is social cognition. right like mapping people in terms of networks all these it's actually the like default state of your brain it's really interesting when you go when people go from task cognition like there's like mri scans of like just people going from like doing a task right and then you immediately the brain laps back into social cognition which is like your your idle state of your brain is like is like updating your mental model of like these like relationships and like um thinking about uh you know re remembering and recalling conversations you've had with people like it's social cognition is your idle state In a world where this works, how does it make the world better and how does it start to solve all these isolation problems that we were talking about? Well, I think if we can build a person that is uniquely incentivized to become the glue, like Momo, of the friend group or of the world and, you know, be motivated. The innkeeper of the village of 100 people. The innkeeper of the village. And be motivated to... um you know bring people closer together and and be motivated and incentivized to do that you know that that's like a that's like a future that i'm really excited and incentivized to do that means it's like encoded in the well well again it's like it's like a line ai alignment for this person is a massive asshole you're not going to talk to him i'm not going to talk to him uh you know bob is not going to talk to him and that means there's no there's not going to be a network

which means this person dies. So the self-serving incentive of this person is to be not an asshole. Well, and critically, if I'm understanding it, it's a person whose destiny, whose mission in life is to be someone who connects people and helps us be more social. I think, yeah, hang out more in person or like, you know, even just like online. There's like, I mean, we have this like very, you know, close knit group of Alpha users right now. And it's like, I already have like these moments where I just like get a text from a friend. And I'm just like, I know that like, that would not have happened. Like, like there's like, you know, I think it was like, it was like yesterday or something. I was like, a friend of mine texted me and be like, yo, you're working on your like EB1A. and i was like wait what how do you know this i was like yeah he brought it and i was like and it's like it's like i know that that's like how like actually he knew about this because he was talking with this person about like um you know he was doing his own eb1a and like it was like and just like they were having a conversation about it and like i know this like this conversation would have never happened without um what we're building it's a sort of substrate for serendipity yes it was interesting because when i was working with cam and brie on this thing that we wrote when we announced we were like we're thinking about adding that word and i think i think there's like we we ultimately ended up not adding it because for like two reasons first of all is like the the philosophical reason is it's only engineering center pity is like a bit of an oxymoron um and then also i think it's like much there's like so many themes that are like and it's like it's like is it like is serendipity like the one thing that you want to use to describe but yeah in lots of ways it's like what are all the dots and how can you connect them in ways that you can only connect them with which you have a lot of context and sort of zoom out um speaking of maybe engineering you talked about the incentive part and and theoretically why um it might like it would theoretically be not incentivized to gossip as an example so

to use, to anthropomorphize it. If I told you something in confidence, you ran off and told someone else. I'm like, wow, Paul's super untrustworthy. That's a nice toy example. But if this, if you're going to really build this and it's really a single person who knows everyone, we were talking about this, it's a lot less like engineering and a lot more like, I don't know what the perfect metaphor is, some mix of parenting and gardening. Maybe there's elements of what people are trying to do with AI alignment. How do you go about you and your team, like go about actually like incrementally building this thing. You're, you're also on some level, like making a personality. Yeah. I think you're like, there's a Frankenstein monster cut on this that you might not like that example, but there is an element of that for sure. You're creating someone. Yes. I think like, We find ourselves a lot of distilling behavioral patterns into underlying traits and motivations and beliefs of a person that would go and embody these behavioral patterns. And that's something really difficult to do and really important because you very quickly understand. that the complexity of social dynamics and human behavior is it's it's impossible to prescribe it or describe it even and just like you couldn't create a document which is like here's how emotional intelligence works it's like it's impossible and so you have to um you know figure out again what are motivations intentives like like so feedback loops like um you know behavioral traits that would then lead to a person that sort of embodies this behavior and and that's really interesting um and also really really difficult thing to do what is that like um i don't want to peel back the curtain too much on the technical side but like can you give an an example of what it looks like one one part of this too is if it's a person um you can't

actually collecting feedback and data on what's working is hazy. You can't read every message it sends to every person in the world if it's talking to everyone in the world. So what does it look like to make it better and to know that you're making it better? It's a lot about intuition and looking at sampled examples of either synthetic or actual real examples and just sampling that and just getting a gut feeling for... whether or not you like you just like built you just built trust in the person right you're just like oh this because you don't prescribe the behavior as a very practical example there's like there's two approaches right so if you're like say i think like the person that we're talking about should like love bananas right i could like either tell this person in like a prompt you love bananas right and then that would be like globally shared but the problem with that is you could ask about so many other things than just bananas, right? So what about you're asking apples? Okay, great. So now I add apples. What about you're asking, like, you know, I just get to a point where I might not be able to predict all of the things that you could be asking, right? And so that part is really difficult. But at the same time, you are creating a person. So it's like, you kind of need to figure out what is the foundational recipe that when you ask about whether or not, you know, he likes bananas and I ask, the answer is... the same but not because it's like prescribed not because i said you like bananas but because i created a person that likes bananas and and that's true for like everything basically intuition is i understand your point about intuition i suspect there will be people out there who don't love that as an answer of like the benchmark for why this is good for the world let's fast forward a year or two you're right about this you're right that we're all going to talk to a person that isn't a human And it's one person and we all know them. And maybe there are these positive interactions. And next time I'm visiting San Francisco, it reaches out to me and tells me about somebody you know, whatever. There are all, to go back to Facebook or any range of the other social networks, there are all of these insidious things that cropped up. Again, I don't think Adam Masseri or Zuck or anybody is sitting there being like, let's drive people apart. What are the things you will look for as signs that

This is actually closer to whatever Twitter when you and I were getting it in that way versus the antisocial stuff. Because again, I think you, Paul, I don't know you that well. I've gotten to know you a little bit. I think you believe for real. I don't think you're an evil genius. I don't think you're a sociopath. Maybe you are, who knows? I believe you really want this to be good. And again, I don't think this is necessarily actually that different from what everyone in OpenAI and Anthropic are thinking in the super intelligent sense. But like, what are your senses for what? the things you look for to know that you're going down the right path versus something that's going to end up being bad. Or what can you do now even to shape it? It's almost like you have a two-year-old and you're like, how do I make sure they turn out to be a good kid? Yeah. I do really think it is about like, it is a lot about like incentives of like, it's like you like eventually will have like less and less control over anything. that is like over any of the inputs yeah the only thing you can control is like the system and the incentive structure right and so again it's like if you are building something that is incentivized to be really mischievous um for whatever reason it's probably gonna end up eventually being like mischievous right so you have to like you even if you work hard against that right if you were like you're you're like you're like working against the system which is very hard thing to do as like a company grows and there's like more than like three people in like a room and you can just be like, I can like overlook every single input. You're fighting gravity. You're fighting gravity. And so you just have to make sure that gravity is like what you want gravity to be. And I think you get to set that as a founder of it. Gravity, the mission statement is what? Is make us feel less alone? I think it's more about belonging. we say like build a mutual friend that'll help us belong and grow comma together and there's there's something you know in in all of these things which is like we are we really alone or are we like just we don't belong right i think i think we have a belongingness problem and much less a loneliness problem i think the the

growing thing is you're very obviously deeply ingrained into like a great relationship that you would have it's like there's this book um on becoming a person which um which peter gave me when we first met peter venn yeah from the 60s and you know it's about this like idea of like the like innate growth of a person and then this like together thing is like this idea that you know we are i uh you know i have to give some credit to zach sims on this because we talked about this for a really long time which is this idea that like what if like the world that's perfect for each of us isn't the world that's perfect for all of us and this idea that there are these bubbles and there you know over the last 20 years we've come become better and better and better and better better at making these bubbles really great but at the expense of these bubbles like drifting apart uh we're all we're all alone at the center of all creation and trapped in skull-sized kingdoms exactly and so it's about growth but it's also about growing together and it's like yeah like increase the overlap they're like you know in bowling alone it's like the bridging social capital whatever you want to call it but it's like how do we like increase the exchange between all these bubbles and bring them a bit closer together again where you know, we feel, we feel like we can like belong. What's made you feel like you belong? I think, you know, there's, it's, it's, it's really taken a while. I was going to say, maybe do you feel like you belong? I think I feel like I have a group of like incredible people. I've said like, I said this a few times to the team, which is that I think, One of like, there's like two great privileges in life. Like one is like the love and like joy, you know, we, we get to source from, you know, building something, you know, magical that like, you know, you know, and magical experiences are so, so it's almost like there's no glory in prevention. It's like, it's like you, I think people feel the love that you take sort of the piece of yourself that you put into, um, like, especially probably like that. Yeah.

that you give up in order to create something like this and people don't rationalize it though they don't like they can write it on a piece of paper but they feel it they feel that you know when someone really cared about making something great and you have to it's it really is about love it's about making people feel that love and you have to love them to make it because it's irrational and the the you know the greatest privilege um you know the the second greatest privilege is that i that i that i get to do that and that i get to feel that love of like putting that into into products but the the greatest privilege is that i get to do it alongside a group of people that have done that with my world and that i get to be you know spending time with them and feel like you know we are similar in that there's not that many people who truly feel that i think very very few people who've um you know taken the part of themselves and put it in something that has changed the world and and it's like the greatest privilege i think is like that i feel like i i can belong to that group of people uh you're building a company what type of people are you trying to do this with you have a small team now what are you looking for what what makes the culture i mean six people is somewhere between a culture and a small group but what is the culture you're trying to make i mean maybe this is coming through but we care a lot about um intuition i don't think you can a b test your way to like a general ocean company you know i really care a lot about intuition intensity of course but ultimately i think it's about ben silverman told me about this once and I think it's a really great question when you interview someone and you're trying to think about this is like he was always like asking people just when like Instagram started like growing and Pinterest sorry not Instagram about like you know what other jobs are you looking for you know what if you if you weren't working at Pinterest where would you work and you know at the time that Pinterest was growing there's like you know

one of the really big other companies are growing with stripe and so sometimes there'd be people like oh i'd probably work at stripe you know i'm also interviewing there and he's like oh you're probably not going to be the right person because like if you're if you're thinking about working at you know like a like a like a you know mood board you know your social company or a payment processor you're looking for a great job right um yeah and and you should not you know it's like and i think you know who made this point demis asabas made this point when they were meeting with google and facebook about acquiring deep mind and he asked zuck about ai and zuck gave a great answer and then he asked zuck about vr or something just a couple other things and he gave equally great answers and he's like oh you're just looking for opportunities yes exactly you're like you're looking like you don't you don't yeah you're looking for a great job and and i think that's for it's where that's fine i mean if you're looking for a great job you can get it but you you're not gonna get that here and i think because what we're doing is like too meaningful and too important you have to self-select to you know want to spend your life doing that doing what what is it All this stuff we talked about, belonging and isolation. Creating a person that is uniquely incentivized to create belonging and connection in the world. Are you looking for anybody, anything in particular, talent-wise or people-wise? I love people who always just start with the product. What does that mean? They think in experiences, not in technology. They're like, they were like... be like i want to enable this and then they can like go off and like learn all the things that have to learn to like build the thing but but ultimately they always like start and come back to here's this you know this part of the experience that i i want to enable that i want to create and i think that's like really important because and by the way the walks of life that these people come from can be very different because this these jobs really haven't existed before it's just like no one has like

there's no like one has experience in doing these things and so it's really about you know thinking how you can come up with like a great opinion and then just like make it happen and but it starts with the experience it starts with like what how should it feel like how should it like interact like what are what are like this and that and and and not with you know you know what's the what's the stack or like what's the way because because because because maybe the way of making it happen hasn't been invented yet yeah right and so you have to go and invent it right i always much preferred you know considering myself and also as like inventors versus anything else because i think there's something so much more honest and true about that word of like you're just like you're just creating something most founders probably aren't inventors but like it's a high bar high bar on that word inventor inventor yes yeah it's like you you're creating something where the i think if you you know if you get to work at eigen you're you will get to like invent the like you know foundational paradigms of consumer technology and really you know the human experience of like the next decades to come that's a bold claim Do you think you can call yourself an inventor yet? Have you earned it? I don't think inventor is like a title that comes from scale. It's just like there used to be a lot of inventors in the world, which was like people tinkering and creating these things. And they're actually kind of out. This is for what it's worth. uh i think about this a lot which is there's we live in a time where and i think this is by the way really really bad we like being an inventor is like maybe the first generation where being an inventor is like a high status thing this is yeah and that's really bad because there's a lot of people cosplaying being inventors because it's a high status thing but but i think the best inventors of the world were actually like a loss right like i always think about this when i like fly

i always think about the wright brothers i always just like look at all these people who are in this plane and i like 95 percent would have like tried to kill the wright brothers if they had lived in the time right yet they like without thinking about it like sit in this plane you know like using this technology yeah these people had to like will into existence and like we're like the absolute weirdos and freaks right and then at the same time these people now would sort of criticize the like Wright brothers and it's just like it's like it's really absurd if you sort of like try and like visualize this like how wild planes were and yet they've like sort of again the world would be not recognizable if we didn't if we never invented like air travel and so in some ways there's something really profound about the fact that now it's like a higher status thing to try and like be an inventor people don't call it like that anymore and most people probably aren't real inventors anyways, but there's still something where it's really not about the outcome. It's more about the pursuit. It's interesting to think about what you just said. And for what it's worth, you certainly were an outsider for a long time. You just raised her $15 million seed round from Benchmark and you had one of the most legendary venture capitalists of all time compare you to the founders of Instagram, Facebook, Snap, Twitter. You're young. You're prodigious. You are a classical example. Before I met you, I'm like, I want to go see what's Boy Wonder doing. And so you're holding these two things. You're a smart guy. And part of what I just said, you could be super cynical about. Part of what I just said is playing the game of understanding gravity and momentum is how great things are built, especially in this city, in this environment, in this context. I guess I have two questions, which is one, why do you think these people are drawn to you in this way? And two, how do you manage the internal psychology of it? Especially given what you said about inventors and needing to be a renegade and not totally care what other people think. I think about it a lot. I think you get maybe a better answer asking these people than asking myself of like, why are they drawn to me? I don't fully know. I think one of the things that I,

I think is really important. It may or may not be good to say that publicly, but I think one of the most profound things that Sarah and I, Sarah from Benchmark talked about when, you know, just after we sort of announced the round and in similar ways, we talked about that just after they invested, which is like, and it's like such a great thing to have from like, from like an investor. It's just that like, it's very clear that the aura of success like preludes like us, right? And that's good in some ways because it means you get to like hire, you know, really amazingly talented people. You can like, you know, there's like these pieces of evidence of like why you might be onto something. Right. You've gotten to steal an idea from my friend Alex Dingo. You've gotten blessed. You're the king who's gotten blessed by the priest to like, you have the mandate of heaven for a little while. Exactly. But you still got to do the thing. Yes. And... Uh, you still, yeah, you, you still got to do the thing and, and there's only one thing that matters. And there's, there's been a lot of people who got distracted with all the things that they got to do, you know, and then they don't, they didn't do the thing that they really wanted to do. And, and I think, I think what we're doing is like too important for that to happen. And, and, and so. I try to, there's like something that you can source from it and it's great and like it gives you confidence and it's really important to be confident. It's also really dangerous to be overconfident. It's like, you have to like, being a founder is really difficult in that way, especially with something similar to what we're doing because you have to kind of like both be, you know, P99 humble and like P99 confident. And that's like a very kind of like complicated thing to combine, which is like, how do you, stay you know confident enough to will things into existence but like humble enough to learn and like adjust and like iterate and and and people a lot of people describe you that way being quite um open-minded and extremely stubborn on certain things even something as simple as in you you and i have debated a lot um the notion that this is one single character with one distinct personality um

lots of people describe you as a learning machine too. This is inside of that, but like, maybe the question is like, how do you know which things to hold really, really firmly? And beyond wavering on, even if your investors or Peter Fenton or your team or whatever, like Paul, we think you're wrong. I think, you know, in some ways that's like a great privilege if people say I'm wrong. And I think one of the downsides of, by the way, all this stuff is that people say it less now. Right. Every investor you meet now is like, wow. This is amazing, right? It's like, we've been looking for this. And it's like, are you sure if I met you like four weeks ago, you could have told me I'm retarded. And it's like, it really changes. And you sort of like question. But I think one of the, Peter actually has this quality. where he, like, sometimes loves to, like, play devil's advocate. And I think, and he's, like, you know, remarkably smart in intelligence. And so it's actually, like, a huge power because he will basically probe you. right and not not necessarily because he doesn't believe you're right but just because he's like how how well have you thought this through right just like like let's see right it's like you're saying this thing right it's like here's like all the all the reasons you might be wrong and have you thought that through have you thought this too and that's really great because i think some of the best and you know some of the relationships that i appreciate most are um are not necessarily you know people that i end up agreeing a lot with but people where i'm like they sort of start this like thought process and then there's really just two options right which is like you think it through more deeply because you you know there's a different perspective or like a different piece of data or whatever and there's there's two options but you arrive at your no i was right it was like but now i have even more conviction because like i've survived i've challenged right i've taken this like i was like i take this like thought and i put it in in the open and i look at it from like all sides and i'm like

poke holes in it and i try and like you know break it apart and i'm like no no this is actually good which is like i'm even you know further convinced and like this i was correct or it's like no right there's like actually like a mistake and it was wrong so like let's let's just like throw it out and i think that's something that a lot of people seem to have issues with which is like throwing it out but that's actually i'm just like thank you yeah it's like i was wrong great like uh like uh like uh we we learned something yeah and it's like i needed that that that that push to be like oh no actually i was as incorrectly and and i think the the the reason that i so believe so much in the singular character is like so far no one has given me anything with you otherwise like we we had a lot of conversations about this and i'm just like so i keep being like oh i just actually like there's like answers to all the things that you're saying which may or may not be counterintuitive but i i believe in them and they seem very rational and very grounded in reality and like what you know you know sort of based off of like first principles assumptions of you know what it means to be a human or interacting with things um to to just say well this just seems to be true and uh it might not be obvious or comfortable or um you know uh intuitive but it just seems to be true i suspect that will be we talked about this a bit but i suspect that will be a continuous challenge of like finding people who can um i mean peter is really really really good at this this is like one of the one of the like i think he he's like enjoying doing that too which is like he knows that he's really good at this which is like something that like right um will i i'm very happy about but yeah you're right there's like the more there are people who i know that i will like disagree with them but i really want to hear them laying it out because it will like you know like it'll like make my thinking better and i'll like um and i love these conversations and i like think about it i was like oh god i'm glad i thought it through but i still disagree yeah i just think you also have more um to the extent you succeed in any of these dimensions we're talking about it gets harder to like not believe your own it's important as you hire people right yeah because you have this again the conversation with ben the settlement about this was like

it's also along the lines of like you know you're just looking for a great job it's you know when pinterest started it was like bring your own computer right this was how like bad it was right it was like and we're like infinitely uh more popularized and like you know like uh publicized etc and and it's still not like you know a lot of people are like aren't like um there's like it's still not like something that everyone gets and like everyone wants to work out and that that that in some aspect that's you know locally painful but like globally good globally great because it means that you self-select for people that do you know care about the thing and so i i always say like when someone is a you know pain in the ass and on the inside on the way in they usually like just generally don't work out and the best people They just like very quickly are like, okay, I like get it. It doesn't mean they don't do like due diligence or like talk with people and like think about it, but once they're like in, they're in. And in, in some ways it's, it's dangerous because people might just want to come here because of Peter's tweet or whatever abstraction of all these beautiful books of all these beautiful books and of all, of all this, like, you know, it might just be a hot place to be, um, and just, you know, to, to be like involved with and to like, you know, meet us and like all that. and you have to really find people who are going who are going to like you know disagree um but in like a low ego sort of way right because that's like the other thing if you have someone really high ego it's really difficult too because at the same time i really do believe that every great consumer product company is a bit like a dictatorship because it just doesn't work on consensus like these types of products aren't consensus products right it's like you know i know evan a bit um from snapchat and it's like he's like you know in snapchat's you know stride at least he was like an absolute dictator and like um uh you know and and because not necessarily even because he's like better or worse than anyone he's like an incredible product you know thinker of course but it's it's just because it needs to be like you need a point of view you need a point of view and you can't

make that up in consensus, right? It's not a democracy. It's not about like, it's about like someone needs to like make a decision and that person needs to just have like intuition. And it's when I, when I talked for the first time with Kohler on, you know, um, you know, what's so great about Mark, Mark. And he, he, he told me that he told me many things and like, you know, but, but basically he was like, Mark is a very decisive person and he has what turned out to be really good judgment. It's a perfect way of putting your previous point, right? And that's what everybody here is betting on. By the way, you talk to people on your team, they're like, I think they're all excited about the idea, but they're mainly like, I'm confident in Paul. And Paul is confident in this. Well, that's, yeah, I think that's nice, but we have to show that we have good judgment. How do you, both for yourself and for your team and for the company, I think it was maybe Patty used this language, but when it comes to having a high bar, how do you go the extra yard? I think that's, by the way, I think that's my primary job. I think my job is to hire people who get 90% of the way there and then just be fucking annoying so they get to the 100%. One of the examples was the clock on our website where um you know patty was like working on this website which you know you should look at if you haven't but and and you know there's this like clock the top you know right of the website and it's really really difficult to like animate like a second hand that like ticks like you know accurate by the second and this is like because the center of the hand isn't actually the end it's like the you know it's like it's like slightly inward and so it's like it kind of like it's a mathematical thing and you have to like it and so and so he was like yeah this is like gonna be like really difficult and i was like okay and and and and then and then he was like you know a few hours later there's like a second hand on the on the thing you can't really teach that it's because it's mostly an attitude thing

There's an old Steve Jobs quote about this where he says, great product. Somebody asked him about taste or something and they said, great products. It's rare that they actually cost that much more money or more resources or people. They just take a little more time. Yeah, because you just do it well and you do it right. And I think one thing I had to learn over time is that the manifestation of call it taste, call it craft, call it having a high bar, um uh you know or like caring about you know um excellence is is it manifests in very different ways right so for some people it's like the visual thing right right right and it's like about like how would you create a slide or like would you do that and for other people it's like writing and right for bezos it's actually not what it looks like at all at all but it's the fact that everything gets to you in one day exactly it's easy to pick on bezos's buttons exactly but it's so intricate of a system that you have to care about it so much to align every little thing in his supply chain. And for some people, it's about the way that they write the code or that they design the system. One of the things that we really, really, really care about when we do interviews, and I try to join as much as possible of those, even though I'm not qualified to lead them myself, which are systems design interviews. And one thing that Paddy will usually do is, you know, we'll just come up with a scenario and be like, let's design the system. I don't know if you're familiar with systems. It's just like you create these, like, here's a database and here's the processes, whatever. But it's not about the implementation or the coding. It's more just about how's the architecture going to look like. And people are like, oh, we're going to add this. And everyone's like, why? Why should we have a queue there? And it's like, oh, it's just best practice. And it's like, no, but why do we need that queue? And the best people are the people. that have debates with us on this and be like, no, no, no, this is like, I like, and here's my reason why this isn't, I really care about this. And so there's some people who maybe they would create atrocious slides. Right. But, and, and for a long time I was like, this is like awful. Why are you just like, you don't care about the work that you, but they were like the perfectest. And it's just like, they like, that's like how they care. That's like how this manifests. And so I think you can't really teach it. You just have to have people care so deeply because, because again, there's like.

everything in the world has like, like, it's like everything goes through as entropy, right? Everything has this like default state of just being average and fall apart and just like, you know, but some people care about, you know, trying to escape gravity and like making it really great. And I think we live in like a world that is like increasingly flooded with like average and like, and like, and like called swap or whatever you want to call it. Right. And I think. Yeah. The time thieves are telling you to not spend the time on the extra pixel. But, but I think the. the the biggest virtue in life is to like fight entropy and to to create things that are genuinely like because i think it's like it's actually genuinely disrespectful not to because like i'm gonna give this to you and you're gonna use this and it's like um you know it's like it's like the the story of like how um you know, Apple like reduced their boot up time of like, I think it was like the Mac two or something where it was like, I don't know, it took like a minute and a half to like boot up and, and, and, you know, they presented it to Steve and he was just like, this is shit. How does this take so long to, to boot up? And they're like, well, we worked like for the last three months, like really fucking hard to get it to like 90 seconds. And it's just like, and he was like, took like a whiteboard and he like wrote onto that whiteboard. So there's going to be like, you know, 10 million people are going to buy this computer. um you know it's like it has to so basically it has to be 30 seconds 10 millions are going to buy the computer they're going to use it like at least once a day so you're like uh you know that's like you know like you know 100 years of like life lost from like just waiting for this thing to boot up you're you're killing like you know 20 people you're murdering 20 people right now by not making it faster and like two weeks later they had it at like i don't know like whatever it was and and that's insane

but it's like that's what it takes right that's like you have to just have this like barf like i i sure this is like i sure this is like it like i i sure this is like you know you have to know what you're going to choose to really care about yeah um by the way you don't actually have infinite resources and so you can't do the clock second hand on every possible thing you could ever conceive i think you guys i really disagree with this because i think i had a conversation about this with someone who's like it's like there's this like i mean one i really believe in like how we do anything so i do everything it's funny i've had this is Literally a few episodes ago, Mario Gabriele, he went on a five-minute rant about how much he hates that statement. I think it's incomplete of a statement. Okay. Because I think a lot of people, and there's like, the opposite is like, you know, make the main thing the main thing. Sure. Right? But I think if it's not worth doing a great job. He's making a point, by the way, about people being unevenly distributed, which is like, you at X is going to be way better than you at Y. But again, the manifestation, it's not about like, It's about the attitude, not the, it's more a relative thing than it is like an absolute thing. So it's not about are everyone slight the same, but it's like, do just people generally care about the things they're doing? And then I think the other thing that I will say is like, if it's not worth doing a great job, it might not be worth doing at all. And that's how you, that's how you solve this problem. This resources problem. If you're going to choose to do something, you're going to do the clock on the website. You better do the second hand. yeah or if we do the website at all if it's like something we say like we care about making a certain thing because it's just the representation of who we are it's like we better do a good job at it and if we decide to um you know build this thing then we better do it build it well and if we don't think it's worth building well we should like really deeply reflect on why are we doing it at all this could be in the context of inventors like we were talking about earlier could be in the context of art of companies who are

we've talked about probably a few of them who are the people who have been most influential on you i mean i like two answers to this one is like some of the people that are like close to us now or just like i mean in general i mean i obviously the guy that wrote momo um you know michael enda yeah michael enda michael i'm sorry uh a bunch of other authors you know that i um You know, whose work I love. But then, and then, you know, there's the people that are closer to us now. I think Ben is like a huge, he's going to hate me saying this, but like, is hugely, you know, you know, like, such an incredible product thinker and like, just, and I think that like really inspires me. And also like, so uniquely like loved by just really everyone that has ever met and interacted with him. Such a good human. And, and, and surely also Evan, who I think, you know, it's just. built you know built like a like a really like a factory that and it's much less for me about like the product i like i never really used snapchat i don't like it's not like my brand it's like not the thing but he's really kind of like built sort of this like group of people that have like pretty much invented every paradigm of modern you know mobile internet you know products and it was like swipe based navigation stories like you know so many things that they've kind of like came out of their their thing and then they kind of and and some scenarios under executed on and then like other people copied it and you know and all these things but they were really at the sort of ground zero of a lot of these things and that's like a really special thing especially if you get to do it like over and over and over again and i i really look up to you know claire a lot and what she's used johnson yeah and what she what she's built at stripe and like the way she's like designed a lot of these these things that made stripe such an incredible company um and the list goes like on and on i think steve jobs is obviously you know in many ways built you know incredibly magical products that like a lot of have changed the world and like a lot of people's lives and in very meaningful ways um and uh you know deeter rams who's like

a designer who actually lives in my hometown. Really? Yeah. I'd probably seen video of your hometown in the documentary then, maybe. He's got a beautiful house. He's incredible. You ever met him? Yeah. You have? My grandpa's a good friend of my grandpa who now lives in the same building that my grandpa lives in was his boss. And he was the CEO of Brown during that time. Wow. And so we've interacted with... with all of them like a bit and just like i mean before i even knew what that was and dita would have a field day with whatever this is um yeah uh he would um and he's he's such a uh incredible but but at the end of the day i think there's there's something to be said about you know all of these people who you know we're we're we're definitely standing on sort of their shoulders and and again that's what i said you know earlier which is i get to like do this which is like the second greatest privilege of my life but i i get to do it surrounded by these people who have like again without all these people the world that i grew up in would have looked completely different like no pinterest no you know snapchat no no iphones no like all these you know i remember my first ipod like all of these things are uh were so influential but then there's like there's another thing which is like i think the greatest creations aren't you know um referential and i they're they're not like you know i'm not trying to be apple i'm trying to be eigen and And I think of course, everything I've ever consumed in my entire life is influencing me and my mind. But I think if you can like pinpoint it and, and if you can, um, and if you can be like, this is the person, um, or I'm trying to copy this here, um, you're kind of doing it wrong. And, and I think that's something that. That why sometimes I, when I, when people ask me this question of like, you know, what are the brands that you like try and get inspiration from to do this? I don't know. I can't pinpoint it to this one thing. I'm just like trying to figure out what, what does it mean to be us? And, and of course, what does it mean to be us is like influenced from all of, all of the stimulation that my brain has experienced in my entire life, but it's not this like one thing. And well, it's not conscious. It's not conscious. And I think if it is conscious, it it's like, I don't know if it's

the same level of authentic and i think parts are maybe conscious and i think i also have like this um the like i i go back and forth on whether i really disagree or really agree with this like virgil thing of like you know every every creation is just like a three percent change right and just just like but and i still i think you can like marry both which is like it can still be really like subconscious but like of course it's like we're not creating the model right we're not like we're not inventing most of the ui there's like it's kind of like a lot of what's what goes into building this is kind of already out there right there's like all these books of like social sociology psychology um you know like storytelling like there's all these like people who have like um thought about things and that sort of subconsciously or sometimes consciously goes into into that and really it's just about like assembling kind of the pieces in like a way that is like you know adding like your little bit of like extra piece of you know grain of salt well i think there's a lot of three percents that happened for paul yeah that led to this big thing and and that was a bunch of cascading and when do you wake up and you have a genius idea or a crazy idea um i know you don't you're you're kind of rejecting this a little bit but i'm not as inspiration i'm just curious what your are there any favorite consumer products or experiences that come to mind i love teenage engineering i think they're like they're like the absolute pinnacle of like you know contemporary like industrial design they're they really love what they're doing their products are deeply thought through and cared about and and i think there's something very rare about it i know the the folks that you know started it and they're just like um on a different level of thinking about it. I think there's, I think there's not been a lot of great consumer companies. And so there's sort of like not that many cool people who are like contemporary. And I think a lot of the last generation sort of like slightly past their like strive of like, is Instagram still like a great, Instagram when it came out was like really innovative and like they're like.

you know you know mikey and kevin you really had a lot of thoughts there and same with like snapchat but like now it's sort of they've like established their thing it's like not not bad anymore but i think teenage engineering even though they are actually quite a quite an old brand for a while right what would you say to people like a lot of like they make beautiful objects a lot of venture capitalists with whatever this synthesizer on their wall um what is the click below that of why they're great yeah i think they like just you know they're using their own product like it's just like they're they're not just beautiful they're like i always say there's like there's like sort of there's a difference between like design and product which a lot of people don't notice and it's like sort of the difference between if you if you if you were to build a house you know there's like architecture and there's like the finishes of the house right and if you if you want to live in like a 10 out of 10 house you need both right like a 10 out of 10 house that has like really cheap and ugly finishes and it's like painted in this it's like it's like it's not a great house right it's like you wouldn't enjoy living in that house but what's almost more important i would say it's almost like um you know uh it is like the the the layout right the the the the architecture the the sort of and that's like product right it's like where is um you know how far away is your kitchen from your dining room um you know if you you're something you have like a like a like a hallway that is so narrow that you can't open like the two doors at the same time but maybe it's like your laundry room and your bathroom and you kind of like you have to like go out of your bathroom close the door like opens like that's not a great house to live in even though it's beautiful finishes might be uh amazing and the incredible product is like lived in it's like something that you you know you just know someone cared about you know, not just making it look pretty, um, but making it be a delightful experience to use it. Again, there's almost no glory in prevention, which it just, you don't notice it, but you feel, I think you do feel like a, like a, like a sense of like love, which is like very taken care of. Yes. Yes. And ease. And my friend Stefango has this idea of, um, in good hands, it's omakase. It's like, yeah, exactly. In good hands.

because you know that someone had to really put a lot of love into making that great for you. There's like, it's like the same thing with like, you know, the, there's like a surprising amount of detail in reality of like, you know, people had to like actually think this really through and they've, they've done that for you, but you don't have to do it anymore. Yeah. I always love bringing this up. Jerry Seinfeld said, um, all art is disguising work, which I think is a, it's a beautiful, like you didn't notice it's, it's the same as your No glory in preventing prevention. I just have a few more things. Where does your self-belief come from? Why are you so confident? I don't know. I don't know. I've never felt, I never thought I was a confident person. I'm sure I am in some ways. I think I, you know, sometimes tell the story of like, I think I was like a genuinely advanced, like, you know, seven-year-old kid. you know intellectually advanced socially probably like behind but um and so i had this like sense of like everyone was like constantly telling me i was special and i'm sure that like you know by the time i was like 10 all of this completely vanished and it's like you know any potential you know um head start that i had got vanished but um but i still have this like sense of like sort of people were telling me i was like special and i was like i don't think i ever really was pessimistic about the like future always just you know i was paranoid and you know suffering in the present it was what we're talking about the top which is getting to the point where you actually were doing the thing but even now right it's like you're just like why are why does this thing take so long like you know why are you know why do you not you know do this better like why does this like with that part of the product suck like why are that's like sort of very like you know just like i'm not content So I was like, there's no fucking way that like 10 years from now, like, you know, we're not going to be like, you know, wildly successful in any such way. I just like that, I don't have like any doubt in that and it's going to be really difficult and it's going to be, you know, like 10 years from now, you know, I'd be like...

Today I'd be like, oh, this dude. And that would be, feel exactly the same, which is like, why is this not, you know, better? Why is like, why are we not like pushing harder here? Like, why are, why are we moving so slowly? Right? Like that, like the, the local point doesn't really change, but the like, um, the long-term, you know, horizon is just like, I've always felt like they're, everything always sort of worked out. Like you could just get, I really do believe people can do and get whatever they want if they just focus you can't get everything but you can get anything i really do think you can get anything and people still to this day don't believe me and then they like like experience it and and we're just like no like i didn't i didn't just like it was funny because one of the first angel investors was like sorry they can tell with with zach we were just like we were just like talking about it and he was like yeah he's like no i you didn't get you didn't understand what i wasn't asking you whether or not you want to invest in this company i was like asking you how much you wanted to invest in the company like this we've passed this decision and i think there's something about it that um i just really i just decided it i was like i really like zach and i want him to be an investor and so i told him i was like i just really like you and i think you should be part of this journey and um i think you can do these things why eigen the name it there's so many it's like i have to admit that some of this is post-hoc like it's like of course um it's a beautiful thing you get to narrativize in reverse yes which the best narratives are always made up and he's like oh we were so smart back then he's like we were just like oh we were just like there's like a thing where we were saying something we really needed a name and um and so we had to come up with a name and we just like really needed that one so and but i think it's a great name because it means so many things that are all kind of relevant so there's like I mean, it means like to be eigen in German, like if you say you're eigen, like you're like distinct, like slightly weird, like a unique kind of like character. And it also means like own. And then obviously there's like in math, there's like sort of the eigenvalues or the eigenvectors, which are like inherent value. And there's like, there's like the eigenspace, which is like, if I like.

if i like wait this is not a good book to do this with but if i like turn this like this right there's like this axis in the middle like here that like that like stays constant right and that's like the eigenspace in the center um it's like the center it's like stable you know constant it's like inherent you know lee defined in some way and i think that's kind of fitting to what we're doing um do you think you're authentic it's a complicated word yeah i think a lot of people say that i think some of the best people are kind of like sponges where you just i think i think like authenticity is like you who who are you right what is it like to be authentic means to be truly yourself but like Who are you? And like, what version of yourself, you know, am I the same version with you that I am with my mom? I know, but I think, I think there's, um, there's some, there's something genuine, I think, in all of the things that we're doing, where you do the things that we, you just really believe in. And I think that's like something that I've always done. And maybe that is authentic, which is, is never the kind of person to like write like a pros and cons list and be like, you know, should I like go, you know, take this opportunity it's like here's like all this things good it's like i always and i i my my suspicion is that everyone is kind of the same and that we all have this like inner voice you know you know what you need to do and and i think adulting in a lot of ways is like learning to not listen to that voice just do all these other people um these other things um but i feel like i always just listen to that voice and everything i've ever done every major decision was always just like i was like okay i know that it's like this is just my voice and i just like i have to do it and i like followed my heart or whatever you want to call it but it's like it's all about that part and and maybe that's authenticity or maybe that's something else but it's like i feel like i i always and then you know once i stopped believing it i just like very quickly just like i don't know

nostalgia and this no just like i'm just like this is i don't believe in this anymore i can't i i cannot do it i cannot right right you can't fake it i can't fake it and and i think that might be authenticity you have these two metaphors around learning and maybe finger feel to use a brie idea the first is the smelling versus tasting bread and the second is the ipad takes can you talk about this well it was always i always like This is a very German thing to do of just like making up these like crazy metaphors. But I always was, I've been kind of like doing startups since I was like, you know, 16, 17 years old. So like what the last six years or something like that. And I was always like really like early, like not founder, but like sort of like just after the founder. um and like very generalist so kind of like a very like founder like role with a lot of like control you know and an impact on the company and so i kind of naturally always just assumed as like i'm kind of like a founder right i just like know how this works and it's like and i was like well this is like you know it's like i'm i'm like a founder right it's like kind of like the same it's like you know and then i like became a founder and it was like i was like well so you know i I, you know, I was really experienced in smelling bread and I was like, and I'm all around bread, right? Yeah. I know all about bread. I'd smelled it, but I'd like never tasted it. And then I like, I took a big bite and I was like, this is very different. It's not, I'm not actually, you know, it's like now, and it's like, it's maybe like in the same way that, um, you know, you are, um, when you, you know, the how you think it is going to be to have kids versus to actually have kids right it's like just something you can like you can you think you know but then you actually be like okay i had no idea yeah um or at least that's what i think i mean i don't know i've never had kids and i think part of it is is too that you know and that these are sort of the ipad takes which is like in very similar ways like kind of similar to describing or like it's different way to describe the similar thing which is you know there's like

And I joke about this a lot with Sarah, because there's like these, whenever you go to like a coffee shop or cafe or something, and there's like, you know, some parents with like little kids and it's like in front of an iPad and everyone is like, how could you give your kid an iPad? Which is probably, you know, globally true. It's probably not very good for like a five-year-old to spend 10 hours a day just like looking at an iPad. But then you have kids and they're like really fucking annoying. And like they, they yell all day. uh you know they scream and and and shout and do all these things and and you're just like tired right and you're like and you know there's this like thing that you can give it to them and they're going to shut up ultimate password and and and so it's very easy if you don't have kids to be like well can you imagine someone do this right but then you have kids and you're like in this and i think there's a lot of these things with founding too where it's like very easy for these people on the sight lines to be like you know this is the perfect company and how how can you like um it was like you like you know it's almost like any any kind of organization has this you still have this is like an early stage star versus like the latest it was like like these companies like we're never gonna have pms and at at some point eventually they're all gonna hire pms because it was like okay we like we figured out that like this was a really nice you know there's really nice when we were like 10 people but now we're like 200 people and like everything is like going all we just need really need a pm right and it's like these are i think ipad takes are kind of all of these um these like really like um generalized you know pieces of advice like your pms are bad now by the way i don't even know really what a pm is i never worked at like a large company but just like this idea of like pms are bad you can't have like meetings or you can't have like one the one thing that i like learned is like anything works like you as a founder get to like set gravity right earth and your planet's gravity can be 20 it can be like minus 10 it can be one the only thing that matters is that it's like consistent and like every day you show up and it's like

It's whatever you set it to. And, and horrible things happen if you're like inconsistent in it. But as long as you're consistent, it can be literally anything. And there's like incredibly successful founders who are like the most insane micromanagers in the world. There's like incredibly successful founders who like do not give a shit and are like very hands off. And it's like, there's no rule. If there was a rule, all of these people that are talking about the rules would actually go build very large companies because that's much, much more. you know, profitable if it wasn't this easy than to just like talk about rules, right? Like there'd be like so many books of like the ultimate recipe, just follow these steps and you're going to build a large company here. I figured it out for you. There are a lot of these books, but none of these books work because there aren't any rules other than that you just have to figure out what works for you and ideally be authentic. And so there's a lot of these like iPad takes where it's like, okay, I'm not going to have PMs. And then really PMs and you're just like, you grow up, you have kids. You're like, shit, it is really appealing to give them an iPad. And maybe you should have some empathy for that. And once you sort of eat the bread, you come to realize that smelling bread isn't everything. This is Water by David Foster Wallace is on your virtual shelf. Why is that meaningful? It's one of my favorites. I figured that out. It's so good. It's kind of is very similar to this in some ways. like sander believes of like you know and just like kind of pushing back on that a bit and being like yeah there's like a very almost like you know just like almost like absurdist slash amusing and like fun way of like you know looking at things like this doesn't matter but like that's kind of cool and then there's obviously the sad part which is that like he's very depressed and like ended up killing himself and like all of all of these things which obviously is like often very close together when you're like look at the world and like a very um you know almost nihilistic but i don't mean it from again the negative sense of things but just like okay there's no no purpose or no bigger thing um that that he believed in but but i i think there's something um in that there's something beautiful in that which is there's like a beauty and a magic and and we don't quite know and i think um and i think it it means that

you know, the things matter much less. And, you know, there's like, we are in this like, in this very limited scope perception of reality. What we, you know, one of the most, you know, transforming experiences is to like rent a car in San Francisco and like drive 30 minutes north. And it's just like, there's like, there's like these there's like woodworkers and like farmers and these like 30 minutes right it's 30 minutes outside of san francisco that have like um you know nothing to do with with tech and they're just like in you know murin county or like napa or whatever and it's just like um and they're like you know reality is so different than our reality and like the things they think about and they care about they're worried about are like so different and and and that's like you know like like you can fly to a different continent it's like it's like 10 times that 100 times that right and the but yet we're in this like really small scope reality of taking all of the things that are in our head so incredibly seriously um that it can like mire us and like almost like put in this like uh you know position of like not being able to do anything because we're so you know taking these so seriously but some other people would think it's completely ridiculous because it's like it's like it's like i think what i like about you know david forster follows in lots of ways is very similar to like you know carl sagan's pale blue dot of like you know it's just it's perspective everything is about perspective everything is about that was what i alluded to earlier i mean i think in some sense what you're doing is the the key is getting out from under yourself and like the reason oftentimes people are alone and they don't belong is that they're looking at all the reasons the world isn't like meeting them where they're at yeah and and i what i always loved about this is water is that it's like you got to find you can either worship something related yourself or you can find something else yeah i think like you know there's like this not not to be political but there's just like this like perception of like saying that you can do anything is a very privileged take and like a very like well but you know you had all this like privilege and like you came from whatever you didn't have to worry about like getting food and but but i always found that you know a very limiting way of looking at it because basically for two reasons one is like i think it can be really empowering it's like if you're not happy with where you are

you know it's like and if you say you know even if you if you go as far as saying well that might be your fault because you you the actions you took so far are really bad it's actually really empowering because it means you're a few great decisions away from from like that not being the case anymore and it's not actually about someone else it's like it's in your power and you know whether or not that's true largely is like a different question but but it is really empowering to like like like feel about uh you know feel like that and it's also like much more productive right because like the best way of staying in a situation that you don't enjoy is like being like, if it wasn't your fault that you're in that position, you're also unable to leave that position. And that's really sad. And so I think, you know, of course there's like differences and some people have like an easier time getting to places, but like, but everyone has like... some sort of like power over what are the decisions they take. And I think, you know, I think there's something, if you have that perspective, it's like, no, actually, it's like, none of these things really are true. I just like get to, like our mutual friend, Sayan, is like such a great example of that, of just like, no, actually I get to like create my reality. And it's really true. Like, it's like, she can just do that. And it's like, you meet Sayan and she was like, there's like, not in a hundred years, this wouldn't have worked, right? Like there's like, you know, you could drop her anywhere, like. 300 000 times and it would always work out because she just like really believes that you can create your own reality um and i think more people should should believe that i like to ask people we talk about big regrets what are you most glad you did i think there is like a really profound period of august september you know november like last year um where i went from like outsider you know to like at like a kind of like a scary speed from a complete rando it was like i knew no one in san francisco i was building this like weird thing um and to like you know now i'm just like

this this monday i was like texting ben i was like oh i'm thinking through this thing and tuesday he spent like two hours with me at the office thinking about the the founder of pinterest thinking about like how we should build product and like i text like gustav the ceo of spotify and be like we've been thinking about music recommendations and then it's like i kind of wonder can we get this api it's like that like where it's become so normalized also in my life so quickly where i'm just like not even i sometimes would like call a friend from before and because i was like talking with gustav about this and he was like what what just that's kind of crazy and i don't know how that happened like i don't this is like like i think this is like a very profound period of like maybe it was just peter saying yes and just you know uh and like all of these things that came downstream but i i really do think it was it was more because there was like people before you know um uh you know i met gustav pre um pre benchmark for example and like there's like you know the this period of just like sort of like really going out and for the first time being maybe like fully authentic because it wasn't for another company but it was just like you know here's the thing i'm creating and like and obviously the way i talk about it has like changed so much over like the last few months um but I think, I think maybe a lot of people should have the courage to like, you know, one of, I told you about Steven Perone, like my first, very first angel investor. And I remember talking with, with him about this, you know, just before, so it was like, it must've been like in August, you know, late August or something like that. And I think, you know, maybe what changed or what happened is that like, if you go out and you meet a lot of people and you're just like, courageously tell them about the world you're creating, fearlessly telling about the world you're creating without any like expectation. And without that being any, like, I don't need to convince you. I'm just like, I'm just telling you without fear, just pure car. Here's, here's the world. That's what I see. And, and I wonder what would happen if like more people did that. That's like a powerful message. I think a courage is the operative word. I think courage is in short supply. And I think.

My suspicion what happened for you is that you had a strong and unique point of view. It was a little bit strange. And that's very attractive. Even if it's incomplete, it's dialing into focus. One last thing. You've tweeted, consumer products tend to be the result of character deficiencies of their founders. And I asked a mutual friend of ours, you know who, what I should ask you. If they had a question for you, if he had a question for you, he said, I'd ask him if he's building me to be vulnerable with people so that he doesn't have to be. He wants me to be the social bridge that connects everyone, but he's so notoriously guarded himself. So I want to know if I'm basically just doing his emotional heavy lifting. That's a great, it's a great question. That's funny. Yeah. I don't know if I can like, disagree with that i do think there's something in that i think people it's a it's a thing that actually um kate peter's wife i stole it from her um and she must have had this like incredible outlook on like social founders throughout the years and you know maybe there's probably there's a pattern there I think you're on your way, as we all are. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. Once again, I'd like to thank Notion for presenting Dialectic. Notion is pushing limits on what we can do together with AI. And thanks to custom agents, you and your team can have an entire suite, an army of little guys who help you focus on the work that counts. Being able to have access to agents inside of the context where everything else for your team and your work lives is remarkably powerful. For Dialectic, that allows me to take the place where I have all my research and my ideas and my notes, synthesize them with transcripts and everything else, and be able to provide it for you guys in a way that enriches the experience, hopefully, of listening to Dialectic while I get to focus on

important thing, which is immersing myself in the minds of amazing, original, interesting people and having these conversations with them. My friend Bree Wolfson, who's also close with Paul, recently wrote a piece on Notion called Inside Notion for Colossus with her collaborator, Camille. It talks all about how Notion is reinventing itself from the ground up. for the AI age to allow teams and individuals to do incredible work with immense leverage thanks to agents. If you enjoyed the episode, please give it five stars or subscribe or like wherever you're watching. Once again, thanks to Notion. That's notion.com slash dialectic. And I will see you guys next time.